Lots of press recently about CraigsList given Y Combinator’s call to entrepreneurs last year to find a way to create a more for-profit version. The call was repeated again this year. Lots of analysis followed with plenty of opinions about what’s good and bad about CraigsList. Bottom line is that the site works and it works well despite all its warts. The business should be an inspiration to entrepreneurs everywhere about how to do more with less and how to win through simplicity. Fred Wilson has a good summary post of that.
Subscribe
About Simeon Simeonov
Events
Get invited to events I am organizing or speaking at.
Top Rated
-
Latest Content
- Apache Spark native functions
- Unicorn pressures and startup failures
- Advertising marketplace design
- Angel investing strategies
- JSON and JSONlines from the command line
- My most favorite math proof ever
- Monitoring Redis with MONITOR and WireShark
- Google and the ecosystem test
- Anatomy of an online ad
- Startup anti-pattern: platform risk
@simeons on Twitter
- To become the market leader in a huge market, first become the market leader in a (ideally fast-growing) niche market. 1 month ago
- I keep talking to startups that claim to be the leaders in large markets while having less than 1% market share. By… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 1 month ago
- There is no market leadership without market share leadership. 1 month ago
- Be selfish: help the climate. fool.com/the-ascent/cre… 2 months ago
- Great thing for #EVQLV evqlv.com twitter.com/philipcball/st… 2 months ago
- ack09
- Adobe
- Advertising
- AJAX
- amazon web services
- angel investing
- Apple
- Automattic
- AWS
- B2C
- Better Advertising
- Blogging
- bootstrapping
- Broadband
- Bubble 2.0
- business
- cloud computing
- customer development
- Digital Media
- e-commerce
- entrepreneurship
- FastIgnite
- Flex
- founder agreements
- FutureOfWebApps-SF06
- Geotagging
- IE7
- Industry News
- iPhone
- lean startup
- Life
- Long Tail
- Macromedia Flash
- marketing
- Metcalfe's Law
- Microsoft
- Microsoft Office 2007
- MIT 100K
- Mobile
- MySpace
- Nantucket Conference
- network effect
- Office 2007
- OpenOffice
- opensource
- Plinky
- Polaris Venture Partners
- privacy
- Ruby
- Ruby/Rails
- SaaS
- Security
- Shopximity
- Social Advertising
- Social Commerce
- Social computing
- social media
- social networking
- startup anti-patterns
- startups
- Swoop
- technology
- TechStars
- The Long Tail
- Thing Labs
- VC
- Venture Capital
- virtual worlds
- Web 2.0
- Weblogs
- Web Services
- Windows Vista
- WordPress
Hi Sim, long time.
I think what the Y-C guys are missing is that CL is more competitive than a purely for-profit version could be. CL can’t be beat by a single entity, though a thousand open-source/open-data cuts may do it in at some point.
Unadulterated capitalism is the most evolved a competitive animal as many sectors can achieve right now; that doesn’t mean capitalism is the end point of evolution.